CAN BHARRAT JAGDEO REALLY MAKE MONEY GROW ON TREES?
JOHN MAIR PAPER FOR YESU PERSAUD CENTRE CONFERENCE ON ECO AESTHETICS AND THE CARIBBEAN
IS JAGDEO CHAMPION OF THE EARTH OR CHUMPION OF THE EARTH?
President Bharrat Jagdeo likes laps of honours. Last Friday in the National Stadium which he built there was an afternoon of paeans of praise to the Comrade Leader for his twelve years in office. Politicians. vice chancellors,self styled bishops and Sir Sonny Ramphal-late of this parish –were in full flow ‘he has helped to cast a pebble into what was an indifferent sea, and the ripples it created are slowly becoming irresistible waves,” said Sir Ramphal,as the Guyana Chronicle so accurately called him.
Jagdeo sat and soaked in all the praise as he did when he was made a UN Champion of the Earth in South Korea in 2010.He was one of six that year garlanded though you have to search to find that fact out .
But with his low carbon development strategy is BJ not Champion but CHUMPION of the earth?
LCDS;THE WAY FORWARD OR A CUL DE SAC?
The low carbon development strategy first articulated in 2009 by Jagdeo is very simple in essence. Guyana will not chop down the trees in her sixteen million hectares of Amazon rain-forest in return for the developed world paying her hundreds of millions of US dollars in multi-national carbon credits which will be used to take the country to a higher stage of development. President Jagdeo seems to be defying the old English proverb Money doesn't grow on trees .
In the world of the LCDS you get money to grow on trees but by NOT doing anything to them.
Will it work?Is it fatally flawed.No and yes
WILL LCDS LEAVE THE STAGE WITH JAGDEO?
Bharrat Jagdeo will leave the office of the President of Guyana after the expected general election on November 14th this year. He is term limited and has done two and a bit already .
Handing over the levers of power which he has so tightly clasped will not be easy for Jagdeo. Much discussion in Guyana centres on him playing Vladimir Putin to Donald Ramator’s Dmitry Medvedev. The PPP is yet to announce a prime ministerial candidate and that could still be Jagdeo. There are also high level rumours swirling around that before he leaves office he will create a super Ministry of Climate Change with much power.
The Head of that Ministry-i will give you three guesses
LCDS FOR BEGINNERS
Put at its’ very simplest LCDS is predicated on the well known ramson aphorism ‘If you don’t give me the money , then I will shoot the baby’(or cut down the trees). Jagdeo set out his stall in 2009 at the Guyana International Conference Centre-another memorial to the Comrade President. Guyana had calculated, or had had calculated, that the forests were worth $600 Million US to the nation each year. They would keep them pristine and un-harvested in return for millions from the REDD- reducing emission through deforestation and forest degradation -fund set up by the UN. This is money paid by governments as trans-national carbon credits to keep the world’s forests intact and slow down climate change. The pot of money was there, Guyana wanted some of it to grow on its trees.
WHERE WILL THE MONEY GO?
Those funds would then be used in development projects such as
-The Amelia Falls Hydroelectric Project deep in the Guyanese interior. A second attempt at harnessing hydro in Guyana.That is being built by a Chinese company but the road to get there is well behind schedule. The contract may for that raises questions.
-The One Laptop per family project. What it says on the tim but for low income families. Visionary to move Guyana forward to the digital reality of the twenty first century.But to get laptops to work you need a national broadband/wi-fi infrastructure. Guyana does not. Ask anybody who has tried to use a laptop in Central Georgetown.
-Specific projects for the Amerindian/Native Indian communities. One which is often mentioned is the proper titling of Amerindian land so historical claims can be put right. Conveniently or not the Amerindians provide the swing vote in any Election
WESTERN GUILT –AGAIN!
All of the availability of REDD and other funds is predicated on Western concerns-or panic or hype,-you decide-on the Climate Change Armageddon and the steps needed to prevent or postpone it. It reached what was supposed to be its zenith with the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009.That was supposed to be the Conference to end all Conferences. World leaders tipped up in scores of private jets. It was an abject failure. No proper treaty emerged.
The new World powers-especially the BRIC (Brazil,Russia,India and China) bloc refused to sing the Western Tunes. The Chinese were not prepared to give up their dash to rapid industrialisation and political power for an environmental principle. That zenith of concern soon became a nadir via the Cancun Conference in 2010 and shows no signs of renaissance for Durban later this year. A clearly frustrated Jagdeo talked in the UN in New York this week of ‘an anaemic delivery on financial pledges made at Copenhagen, and formalised in the Cancun Agreements, is leading to a disastrous breakdown in trust between the developed and developing world’
So Western guilt and money has ebbed and flowed.
Currently it is at a low water mark.
BEFORE THE TIDE WENT OUT
Jagdeo had first developed the LCDS in 2008 with Mckinseys of New York,a ritzy and expensive firm of consultants. The glossy brochure was a very shiny begging bowl. The whole project has been and continues to be largely driven by foreign consultants. I met Stephne Grin the current lead consultant in May in the Office of the President. His background is not Main Street Georgetown but Wall Street Manhattan.
Scandanavia is usually at the forefront of the world’s concerned.The Norwegian government was the first (and last) to throw a tithe into the LCDS begging bowl. They pledged $215M by 2015 with a down payment of $80M in 2009/2010.
Look at that in micro terms-it is $1000US for every man,woman and child in Guyana.
The money was placed with an international intermediary in an escrow account at the World Bank in Washington. It is still there as far as I know. Not one kroner has washed up on Guyanese shores.
WHY? WELL YOU TAKE YOUR PICK
There are several and contrasting explanations/
a.Noise from the Opposition .They will never be in power again-the racial sums do not add up- so the political and journalistic opposition make plenty noise internationally and shout into any ears they can find.The main message is ‘Jagdeo is unfit to govern so too the PPP’. They point to alleged corruption in awarding the Amelia falls road contract to a PPP friend with little experience. There is some truth in that
and they point also to the initial hiccups in awarding the One Laptop Per Family contracts too.
There are signs that their poison in ears is working in Washington
b.Our hands are clean say the government. The Climate Change unit expresses bewilderment at the stasis. They say it is not the World Bank’s role to place conditional ties on the money ‘It is Guyana’s money not the World Banks’ and that they should pass over the money toute suite to a more neutral banker like the IDB or the CRB.(Caribbean Reserve Bank).It is still in the vault of the World Bank.
LESSONS FROM IWOKRAMA
There is an exemplar-positive and negative; the Iwokrama project also in Guyana. That started with idealism too-one million acres of virgin forest given to the Commonwealth by then President Hoyte in 1989.It was to combine conservation. commerce and science. But in two decades it has lurched from crisis to financial crisis and is now much reduced in scale and ambition. It was saved by money from Jagdeo, parachuting in a white man in Edward Glover in as Chairman and moral support from Prince Charles.
This very summer my son Matthew –whose pictures you are seeing-went to Iwokrama for four days. I too went a decade ago. It was struggling then, it is struggling now. This summer there were just five pure paying tourists and about a dozen students and teachers on scientific projects. External income cannot be big. This is not a business by a long stretch. Iwokrama is stlll firmly in the intensive care ward.
SO DOES MONEY GROW ON TREES OR NOT
On balance the situation in 2011 is redolent of that one hundred years and two hundred years ago. Guyana is a small part of a globalised market with globalised market forces which move much swiftly these days .Those market forces are subject to imperialist whim but that of the new imperialists-China and India to the fore.
This time the trade is not sugar or the gold of El Dorado it is carbon credits and virgin forests.The rich nations-the market makers-decide the price and even if there is a market at all.
Money,sadly ,does not grow on those trees.
Even Jagdeo cannot defy the proverb.
John Mair 22.09.2011
1500 words